Interiors: a playful Glasgow home

Full of salvaged and second-hand items, a traditional Glasgow townhouse has
become a vibrant space.

‘We couldn’t get over the size of the house and the scale of the rooms'Photo: Douglas Gibb

By Mairi MacDonald

7:00AM BST 12 Jun 2014

Walk through the front door of the Roberts family’s elegant Glasgow townhouse and you will be greeted by three energetic boys and a headless mannequin. ‘He came home from a film set one day and never left,’ the interior designer Cori Roberts says of the latter. She and her husband, Jake, a film editor whose latest project is an adaptation of Colm Tóibín’s novel Brooklyn starring Saoirse Ronan, moved from London six years ago to set up the home they share with their sons, Louis, now seven, Milo, four, and Jonah, two. ‘Jake was offered a job editing for [the director] David Mackenzie in Glasgow,’ Roberts explains.

The three-floor, five-bedroom Georgian house in the city’s West End is blessed with big windows and high ceilings. ‘We couldn’t get over the size of the house and the scale of the rooms,’ Roberts says. ‘Our whole flat down south would fit into the ground floor of this house.’

The entrance hall is an eccentrically decorated space with large-scale black and white chequerboard tiles, a staircase that curves dramatically up to the first floor, and walls covered in bee-patterned wallpaper on which little fingerprints conveniently do not show up. It sets the tone for what lies beyond.

Although the property was in good condition when the couple bought it, it certainly was not to their taste. The poky kitchen had minimal white-gloss units and a pantry behind it, and there was a separate, formal dining room. They decided to reconfigure the floor into one space by removing two walls. ‘We wanted a large open-plan living area so that we could all be in one place without being on top of each other,’ Roberts says. Carpets came up and wide planks of reclaimed-oak flooring went down, lending a sense of continuity to the different zones – the living room at the front of the house and a kitchen, dining and utility area at the back.

Roberts, who moved from Sweden to London to study sculpture at Central Saint Martins when she was 18, has decorated the house with a Scandinavian flavour. Clean lines and pops of colour and pattern stand out against a predom-inantly white backdrop. ‘I also wanted to create an organised, uncluttered home,’ she says. Echo-ing the English Arts and Crafts designer William Morris, she explains that she wants everything in the house to be ‘beautiful as well as functional’.

None the less, the sense of playfulness embraced in the entrance hall crops up throughout the home. Books on shelves are arranged in blocks of colour, and the kitchen units have 1950s American diner-style curves and hardware. One floor up, three enormous beanbags almost fill what has become the family’s cinema-cum-party room. A fold-out bar and disco ball provide the perfect finishing touches.

Although the master bedroom next door is a far calmer space, decorated in muted shades, there is a Dorothy Draper-esque glamour in the way diverse furnishing styles have been mixed there: a zebra-print rug meets foliage-rich vintage wallpaper.

The majority of the items Roberts has filled the home with are vintage, from the reclaimed kitchen to the 1970s modular sofa found on eBay. ‘My father is an artist and my mother is a photographer, and I was brought up pulling things out of skips. It is in my blood.’ She is so passionate about the aesthetic and sustainability issues surrounding vintage design that she has started a blog, Reclaim the Soul, that offers tips on embracing the style.

The children share two bedrooms and a bathroom on the top floor, where, just down the corridor, Jake’s cutting room and office is tucked in under the eaves. ‘Directors are expected to sidestep the children and the toys on the way up here,’ Roberts says. ‘It is all part of working from home.’ That said, Jake is often away filming. The day after our photo shoot he was going to Montreal for a month. ‘When he is home we like to stay put, so it is important that we have a fun, warm, beautiful home to enjoy.’

The dining room and utility area

(DOUGLAS GIBB)

When Cori and Jake Roberts were redesigning the layout of their home’s ground floor, Jake’s mother advised that ‘all homes should have a utility room’. To maximise their space, Cori designed a cupboard with folding doors, now also home to a reclaimed butler’s sink. The table and chairs are from Green Daddy Furnishings.

The kitchen (main picture, top)

The 1950s kitchen was bought through the salvage website Salvo, as were the tiles, from a hospital. ‘Apparently Jamie Oliver has the rest,’ Cori Roberts says. The Godin Souveraine 1500 cooker was bought through Gumtree. The island worktops were made from benches from a school science lab found atGlasgow Architectural Salvage.

The entrance hall

(DOUGLAS GIBB)

Roberts has chosen wallpaper by Timorous Beasties for the staircase as ‘one of three things we’ve bought that are not old, reclaimed or second-hand’. Shoes are kept in an old post office pigeonhole unit, above which is a French coat rack from a second-hand shop in Chiswick,The Old Cinema. The painting at the far end of the hall is by Paul McPhail.

This room, complete with a projector screen, is painted in Breakfast Room Green by Farrow & Ball. This is where the family watch films and relax on giant beanbags byBudda Bag.

The master bedroom

(DOUGLAS GIBB)

A peaceful oasis has been created using wallpaper from Rosie’s Vintage Wallpaper on one wall and Cinder Rose paint by Farrow & Ball on the others. Roberts’s big indulgence is the ex-display king-sized bed from Savoir. At the foot of the bed is a vintage Habitat sofa, and between the two windows is a one-off upholstered chair fromTimorous Beasties.

The bathroom

(DOUGLAS GIBB)

The bathroom on the first floor is supposed to be a child-free zone, but with a double shower and a free-standing bath there is ample room for all the family. The tiles on the walls and slate on the floor, fromVictor Paris, and the Philippe Starck bath and basins create a polished look, which is softened by an antique phone table beneath the window and a potted tree. Roberts found the table on the street in Deptford, London.

Milo and Jonah’s bedroom

(DOUGLAS GIBB)

This room, on the third floor, doubles as a playroom, with swinging seats from Ikea screwed into the ceiling. Three walls are painted with blackboard paint, allowing for artistic freedom, while the fourth is wallpapered with a giant map of the world fromMaps International. They sleep in a Kurt bunk bed from Parisot Beds.